Five ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Questions Answered By ‘The Last Jedi’

Star Wars: The Last Jediis finally here, and with it so are the answers to some of the biggest questions raised by Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Granted, Rian Johnson’s addition to the saga from the galaxy far, far away did’t answer every question we had about J.J. Abrams’ film. (So, we’re just going to pretend like C3PO didn’t have a red arm for no reason for the entirety of The Force Awakens? Oh, we are? Oh, okay.) But we won’t have to wait until Abrams’ Episode IX to learn all the Jedi secrets. Here are five of the most shocking revelations in The Last Jedi. (And, obviously, there are SPOILERSahead.)

Disney

1.Who are Rey’s parents?

Oh, the speculation. Oh, the guesses. It’s been the number one question on fans’ minds since The Force Awakens: Who are Rey’s mysterious parents? Who gave birth to this incredible Force-sensitive child and then abandoned her on the desert planet of Jakku? When Kylo Ren and Rey finally come face-to-face, he forces (heh “Forces”) her to confront the truth: Rey’s parents weren’t Han Solo and Princess Leia. They weren’t Luke Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi. They were nobodies. And that’s what makes Rey truly special.

Lucasfilm

2. What happened at Luke’s Jedi training school?

In The Force Awakens, we got fleeting glimpses of the event that transformed Ben Solo into Kylo Ren, and turned Luke Skywalker into a space recluse. In The Last Jedi, the full story is revealed. It wasn’t just that Ben destroyed Luke’s new school and the rest of the students; it was that Luke tried to kill Ben, after sensing the full extent of his dark power. But there’s more to the story than that: As Kylo Ren tells it, Luke straight-up tried to murder him in his sleep when he had done nothing wrong. As Luke tells it, he was afraid of what Ben was becoming and, in a momentary lapse of judgment, considered killing him. (Remember what Yoda said: “Fear is the path to the Dark Side.”) Luke realized his mistake, but too late; Ben woke up to discover his master caught lightsaberhanded. Star Wars has always drawn from the films of Akira Kurosawa; George Lucas famously based the first film on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. The multiple versions of this flashback is straight-up Rashomon.

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3. Why didn’t Luke come back when Leia and Han were in trouble?

Some bad stuff went down at Luke’s school. But this is Luke Skywalker, the great beacon of hope in the galaxy. And in The Force Awakens, his best buddy Han Solo and his sister General Leia were in desperate trouble. (Also R2-D2! He loves R2-D2, and he basically had a droid version of PTSD.) People who are sensitive in the Force can sense when their loved ones are in trouble. When Luke sensed the events of The Force Awakens, wouldn’t Luke give up his self-imposed exile to help them? Actually, he might have, if he had sensed them. We learn in The Last Jedi that Luke has closed off his connection to the Force. So that’s why Luke never came to the rescue; he didn’t know anything was wrong.

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4. How was Rey, who’d never been in a lightsaber fight before, able to beat Kylo Ren, who’d been trained by Luke Skywalker?

This Force Awakens plot point stuck in the craws of a lot of Star Wars die-hards. Rey has barely even held a lightsaber before, much less fought with one, when she confronts Kylo Ren at the end of the film. So how did she do so well in that fight? Kylo should have wiped the floor with her. The Last Jedi offers an explanation: Killing his own father put Kylo “out of balance” and so he wasn’t in the right mental space to fight someone. Plenty of viewers suggested this as a rationale after watching The Force Awakens. But it’s canon now suckers!

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5. How tall is Snoke?

He’s normal-person sized. He’s not a tiny person, or a giant. It was just a big hologram, my dudes. Deal with it.